The Thames from Hampton Court to Sunbury Lock

Tagg’s Island 2

the car factory

In 1941 the island was taken over by AC Cars, who converted the hotel grounds into a factory. They made fire fighting equipment, aircraft parts, radar vans, flame throwers, guns and sights, and built a Bailey bridge from the Middlesex bank in 1942, downstream of the present bridge.

 

Production continued on Tagg’s Island after the war, and by the 1960s AC Cars moved their tricycle Invacar invalid car production line to the island—which is pretty funny, given that the company is famous for high-performance sports cars: an AC Cobra doing 196 MPH on the M1 in 1963 is often quoted as the reason for introducing a 70 MPH speed limit on motorways.

 

Production of Invacars ended in 1976 when the government decided it made more sense to pay for ordinary production cars to be adapted for disabled users than to hand out slow, unsafe and inconvenient Invacars. I think their production line on the island must have ended about 10 years earlier.

 

 

death of the hotel—birth of a new community

Meanwhile the hotel again passed into the hands of yet more owners who couldn’t make money out of it.

 

It was bought by Mr J.R. Rennie in 1956 (or maybe March 1959). He had plans to replace the hotel with a block of flats and an indoor ‘fun palace’, but the plans were rejected by the council.

 

At some stage around 1961 there was a fire and the building never operated as a hotel again.